Abstract
Humans can acquire the statistical features of the external world and employ them to control behaviors. Some external events occur in harmony with an agent's action, and thus, humans should also be able to acquire the statistical features between an action and its external outcome. We report that the acquired action-outcome statistical features alter the visual appearance of the action outcome. Pressing either of two assigned keys triggered visual motion whose direction was statistically biased either upward or downward, and observers judged the stimulus motion direction. Points of subjective equality (PSE) for judging motion direction were shifted repulsively from the mean of the distribution associated with each key. Our Bayesian model accounted for the PSE shifts, indicating the optimal acquisition of the action-effect statistical relation. The PSE shifts were moderately attenuated when the action-outcome contingency was reduced. The Bayesian model again accounted for the attenuated PSE shifts. On the other hand, when the action-outcome contiguity was reduced, the PSE shifts were greatly attenuated, and however, the Bayesian model could not accounted for the shifts. The results indicate that visual appearance can be modified by prediction based on the optimal acquisition of action-effect causal relation.
Highlights
Humans can acquire statistical features of external events and use them to accommodate their behaviors
Based on the outcome of t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA), we suggest that the PSE shifts based on the acquisition of action-effect relations are moderated with a larger width of the prior distribution
We recently found that the acquisition of an action-effect relation has a side effect: visual interpretation of action outcome is strongly modulated by the acquired relation between an action and its outcome
Summary
Humans can acquire statistical features of external events and use them to accommodate their behaviors. The acquisition of an action-outcome relation will be strongly attenuated when the prior distribution (i.e., the Gaussian distribution of a relative contrast in a superimposed grating) is wide, consistent with a previous study (Miyazaki et al, 2006a) To confirm this prediction, using a new group of 10 observers (5 females and 5 males), we tested whether the PSE shift as observed in experiment 1 is reduced when the standard deviation of the prior distribution is increased from 0.06 to 0.15. The Bayesian model predicted the significant difference in the PSEs between two bias conditions while empirical data demonstrated that the PSEs were not different between the two conditions To sum up, these results indicate the following two points; first, acquiring an action-outcome relation is strongly reduced when a large delay is inserted between an action and its outcome, and second, the large delay between action and outcome hinders the optimal acquisition of action- outcome statistical relationship. Because an agent does not likely consider the event (i.e., drifting grating) as a causal outcome of her/his action when delay is inserted between an action and its outcome, only a weak acquisition of an action-outcome relation possibly results in
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